When deploying PVS 6.1, we had difficulty with the XenDesktop Setup wizard. PVS couldn’t see the template from SCVMM, and there were few resources available as it didn’t appear many Citrix users employed Hyper-V for PVS. Ultimately we ended up calling Citrix for support and after a few days they revealed that it was imperative (yet at the time, undocumented) that you choose “Customization not required” when creating your template. About 6 months after our support call, Citrix published CTX134843 to warn unsuspecting users of the trouble lurking ahead. Suffice it to say I was looking forward to a smooth deployment with Provisioning Services 7 now that the surprises were out of the way.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. 18 months later, there still aren’t a lot of users out there using Hyper-V actively posting (as compared to ESX or XenServer). So when we ran into an issue using the XenDesktop setup wizard in PVS, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. We tinkered and toyed with CDF traces and got yet-another-cryptic-message: KeyNotFoundException. After spending a bit of time viewing the powershell commands in the CDF trace it wasn’t entirely clear what was going on. To make matters stranger, deploying VMs from the streamed VM wizard actually worked. The same VM template still worked on PVS 6.1 as well.

At this point, we decided to contact Citrix Support. We had assumed our template was ok given that the streamed VM wizard completed, but the XenDesktop wizard hadn’t. While waiting for Citrix to get back to us, we stumbled upon the answer. In PVS 6.1, your SCVMM Virtual Machine template did not require a network connection. However, in PVS 7.0, you must attach the network adapter to a logical network or the VM creation will fail.